57. Can't Stop the Rain

Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own it.

So, so sorry about the wait. I've been busy these past few weeks. Hope you like this chapter. It's a two-parter. Fancy, huh? :P

The rain poured down harder than Meredith ever remembered. The drive into work with Derek had taken them twice the normal amount of time, and the two minute walk from the car to the entrance of the hospital had left them both soaked, even though they'd shared an umbrella. December was always a particularly rainy month in Seattle; downed power lines and trees were not uncommon in the least. Dark, gloomy days like this always made it hard to leave the warm comfort under the covers, but soon enough, they'd have four days off for the upcoming holiday season, which had everyone counting down the hours this time of year.

"In my next life, remind me to move to Hawaii," Meredith said upon entering the resident lounge. The ends of her hair dripped with rain water, and her jeans were almost completely soaked through. She set her bag down onto the bench, then proceeded to remove her wet clothing piece by piece. The dry scrubs sitting on the shelf never looked more appealing.

"Damn, did you fall in a puddle?" Alex asked when he and Izzie walked through the door.

Meredith rolled her eyes and laughed. "Have you not noticed the torrential thunder storm going on outside?"

"I haven't left the building since yesterday morning. On-call last night," Alex explained, taking a sip of his coffee.

"Lucky you," Meredith smirked. "Where are George and Cristina?" she asked. Usually they all met up in the mornings before getting their assignments, so their absence had her suspicious.

"Both in surgery already," Izzie said.

Meredith changed into her scrubs quickly; the soft, dry fabric felt good on her slightly cool skin. "Where were you two?" she asked teasingly.

"On-call room--sleeping," Alex replied nonchalantly, though he knew Meredith saw right through the fib. She and Derek had disappeared into plenty of on-call rooms, and hardly ever for the purpose of sleeping.

"Uh huh," Meredith giggled. "I'll go along with that."

"We'd appreciate it," Izzie said with a cheeky smile, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

Bailey entered the lounge seconds later with a stack of charts in her arms. Meredith could tell by the tired look in her eyes that their former resident had been up all night dealing with the fall-out from the never ending storm. "Okay. I'm gonna be quick. Hunt and Shepherd need one of you down in the ER to deal with the traumas rolling in from the damn natural disaster going on outside. Dr. Robbins needs one of you for a pediatric heart transplant. And whoever is left gets the pleasure of assisting the Chief with a Whipple." She deposited two charts on the table and yawned. "I'm going to sleep for a few hours. Keep yourselves out of trouble."

"Whipple," Alex called out, reaching for the chart and staking his claim for the case before the other two had the chance.

Izzie scoffed. "What the hell?"

Meredith leaned against her cubby and let the fiancés bicker until they made their decisions. She didn't care what she ended up doing for the day. A Whipple and a heart transplant were great, but working with Derek in the pit wasn't a bad way to spend the day either, so while she waited for them to come to an agreement, she brushed out her damp hair with her fingers.

"Mer, what do you want today?" Alex asked considerately, seeming to notice her waiting patiently.

"Don't care," she yawned before taking a sip of the hot coffee in her mug. The dark, dreary day combined with the fact that she was up having sex with Derek until one in the morning wasn't helping her body rise and shine.

"Come on, you have to have a preference," Izzie insisted.

Meredith laughed. "If I can get some on-call room time with Derek by taking the pit, that's fine with me. And I know neither of you are fighting over that one. So..." she said, pulling on her white coat. "I'll take it." After giving her friends a smile, she exited the lounge and made the trek toward the elevator.

"Hold it, Grey," Mark called out before the elevator doors shut. Meredith pushed the door back open with her hand so Mark could enter, then pushed the button for the first floor.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

Mark sighed. "Pit. You?"

"Pit," Meredith echoed. "Lots of rainy day fun ahead. Were you paged?" She checked her pager to see if she missed anything.

He shook his head. "No, just checking in. Seeing if anyone needs to be prettied up," he grinned.

"Uh huh," she giggled. "Because I'm sure face lifts trump medical care..."

"You never know," Mark countered as the two stepped off the elevator.

They were immediately met with heaping amounts of chaos, people running all around and seemingly no order whatsoever. Meredith looked to Mark with wide eyes. "Wow," she murmured, looking back to the scene in front of her.

Mark sighed. "Yeah."

Meredith saw Derek wave her over as he pulled on a pair of gloves. She ran to where he was and he handed her her own pair of gloves. "New trauma coming in. Want in?"

"Yeah," she nodded enthusiastically. They both gowned up then met Owen at the entrance to the ER, standing inside the doors to keep from getting soaked from the downpour.

A flash of lightning broke through the sky, bringing with it bright white that lit up the darkness outside. Meredith flinched in surprise, moving closer to Derek. "You okay?" he asked, kissing her temple.

"Yeah. It just scared me," Meredith reassured him.

"Ambulance is pulling up," Owen announced.

Derek peered out the doors. "Do we know what happened?"

Owen shrugged. "Little kid hurt in his backyard. That's all I know," he said.

The ambulance pulled up to the doors of the ER and the paramedics quickly ran around to open the back of the vehicle. Meredith, Derek, and Owen walked over, unable to dodge the golf ball sized raindrops that fell from the sky and splattered all over them. But the rain was quickly forgotten when they saw the young child on the stretcher. No more than five years old with burns over most of his body. The sight almost made Meredith sick to her stomach.

"What the hell happened?" Derek asked as they hurriedly removed him from the ambulance and into the ER doors. They wheeled him into Trauma 3 and began assessing the damage.

"Aaron Decker, age five. His mom found him unconscious next to the trampoline with what appear to be third degree burns to the scalp, shoulder, and leg. Likely that he was jumping on the trampoline at the time when he was repeatedly struck by lightning. He had a seizure en route and what appeared to be a mild heart attack. Pulse was thready but we got it going again after pushing three of epi."

Meredith stared at the little boy clinging to life on the gurney and shook her head. "Who the hell lets their kid jump on a trampoline in a lightning storm?" she asked to no one in particular, the anger flowing through her veins. "And at eight in the morning, no less."

"Where are his parents?" Derek asked, checking Aaron's pupils for activity.

The paramedic shrugged as she handed the chart off to Owen, getting ready to head off back to the ambulance. "His mom was following close behind. She should be here soon."

"Okay," Owen nodded, carefully peeling back the gauze on the through and through wounds to the boy's shoulder.

The paramedics left the trauma room just as Mark was entering. He stopped cold in his tracks when he saw the three others beginning to tend to the Aaron's injuries. "What the hell happened?" he asked, pulling on a pair of gloves.

"Struck by lightning," Derek said. "Third degree burns all over. We're gonna need you in the OR, so don't go too far."

"Okay," Mark agreed. He noticed the burnt flesh on top of the boy's skull and winced. "God damn it," he sighed. "He's lucky the bolt didn't crack his skull wide open."

Derek handed Meredith an IV anesthetic to keep the boy sedated then looked to Mark. "Did it burn the skull?"

"Yeah. Not enough to burn his brain, but there's some damage," Mark told him. "Probably gonna need to do a skin graft to replace the lost skin on his scalp. Where else is he burned?"

Meredith succeeded in inserting Aaron's IV and sighed. "Shoulder and right leg. Seriously, what were his parents thinking?"

She knew that she needed to not think about the boy's crappy parents and focus on keeping the five year old alive, but she couldn't help but sympathize with him. After all, Meredith was practically the poster child for parental neglect.

"Don't worry about them," Derek said calmly. "He's gonna be okay."

"Derek, look at him. He's lucky he's still alive," Meredith countered, her voice irritated.

"Doctors, his mother just arrived. She's in the waiting room," an ER nurse said, peeking her head into the door.

"Meredith, go get any information you can, then meet us back here," Owen requested.

Meredith pulled off her bloodied gloves and nodded. "Okay."

She left the room and the nurse pointed her in the direction of the mother, a blonde woman that bore a striking resemblance to Ellis at that age. Meredith swallowed, reminding herself to keep calm, then walked over to her.

"Mrs. Decker," she said, extending her hand. "I'm Dr. Shepherd. I'm one of the surgeons working on your son. I need you to give me any information you can about what happened."

Meredith led the woman to two available seats, and they each occupied one of them. She set the chart in her lap, waiting for his mother to brief her on what happened to her son.

"Well, I was in the house when it happened. I just found him out there afterward, lying on the ground. When I saw him there, I yelled his name. As I got closer, I noticed how…his body had smoke coming off of it and he wasn't answering," his mother said, choking back a sob. "I didn't even know he was outside."

Meredith nodded slowly. "He seems to have been struck by lightning multiple times. On the way here, the paramedics told us he also suffered a seizure and a small heart attack—which are common after this sort of accident. Right now, he's sedated and we gave him an IV to lessen the pain. It's going to be a while before we can take him into the OR. We need to give Aaron a CT scan to check for brain injury. And x-rays to check for broken bones. He may have internal bleeding as well. We're still assessing him so we don't know for sure, but I just want to prepare you…" she swallowed. "We're going to do everything we can to…" How does one tell a mother that her son may not live to see the next day? It's the one part of the job that she hated.

The boy's mother wiped her eyes and looked to Meredith desperately. "You think he could die?"

"Like I said, right now, he's stable. But his body has been through a significant amount of trauma. His surgery is going to be long and extensive. But his age works in his favor. Children are resilient," Meredith said, trying to sound reassuring.

"I should have been checking on him," she said frantically, running her hands through her hair.

Meredith knew she may be crossing the line, but her curiosity got the best of her. "Where exactly were you?"

Mrs. Decker's demeanor immediately changed, and she focused her eyes on the coffee table between them. "I forgot Aaron had the day off from school, and I had a friend coming over. I guess I got distracted and wasn't listening when he asked if he could go play outside."

"So you were…in the kitchen?" Meredith guessed. That's usually where people had morning coffee with their friends, right?

"Actually, no. I was, uh…I was upstairs at the time," she said, trying to sound nonchalant. "I was in my room, which is why I didn't see him outside, or else I would have told him to come in."

Meredith simply nodded. She had gotten all of the information she needed. Neglectful mother "entertaining" a guest in her bedroom while her five year old was keeping himself occupied in a thunderstorm. Just as she was about to excuse herself to go back to the trauma room, Mrs. Decker spoke.

"My husband is out of town. He's always out of town," she said remorsefully. "But Dave, he's there for me. He's my…" she said, trying to search for the right word. Boyfriend. That was the word. But Meredith decided not to provide it. They both knew what she meant. "And now my baby could die because I was cheating on my husband."

Mrs. Decker sobbed into her hands and Meredith quickly pulled some tissues from the box on the coffee table and handed them to her. "These things happen," Meredith whispered, reaching for the woman's hand. And she wasn't just saying that. Meredith had lived this life for many, many years. Aaron was just another victim of a broken home.

"I need to get back to your son," she said after a few minutes of sitting with the woman. "I promise you that we're going to do everything in our power to make sure he's okay."

She walked back to the trauma room, her mind racing with emotion. Anger, sympathy, worry. Things like this were part of the job, but when they hit home like this, it was never easy.

"Any info., Grey?" Mark asked as he, Derek, and Owen tried to stabilize the five year old enough so he could be transported for tests.

Meredith slipped on another pair of gloves. "The mother was inside when it happened, so she didn't give me much."

"So the kid was unsupervised…jumping on a trampoline…struck by lightning…and would have been left for dead if she hadn't checked on him?" Mark sighed, putting the information together. "Mom of the year…"

"Yeah well, that's not all," Meredith said, shaking her head.

Derek looked to her curiously. "What do you mean?"

"She was doing more than…not watching him," she explained, helping her husband secure a temporary bandage on Aaron's skull.

"Meaning?" Owen asked.

"Let's just say she was busy in the bedroom at the time," Meredith said plainly.

Mark raised his eyebrows and nodded knowingly. "Aah. Got it."

"Yeah," Derek and Owen echoed in unison.

"Okay, we've done all we can do for now. CT is waiting and we have an OR prepped for when he goes in. If you two wanted to head upstairs, page us when he's ready for surgery," Owen said with a nod. He flipped Aaron's chart closed and handed it to Meredith. "Let's hope for the best."

Meredith took another look at the boy. Burned, intubated, sedated, unconscious. A patient truly clinging to life. "Yeah," she whispered. "Let's hope."

--

Derek and Meredith sat in the CT viewing area, waiting for the images of Aaron's insides to appear on the screen. They were both expecting the worst of course, but part of them wanted to believe that he'd gotten lucky; that he would be in the minority and live to see tomorrow.

"If he lives, what's his prognosis?" Meredith asked quietly. "I mean, will he ever think again? Or walk? Or live a normal life?"

Derek sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I dunno. This sort of thing…I've seen lightning victims before, but never on this level. He may be…deaf, blind, paralyzed. We won't know until we get in there and see how bad it really is. Right now though? He's looking at a long recovery, months of physical therapy, likely PTSD," he said sadly. "Poor kid."

"Yeah," Meredith breathed. "We're not getting a trampoline for our kids…"

He pressed a soothing kiss to Meredith's temple. "There's a chance, Mer. He could live."

"And then he gets to go back to a mother who would rather screw around on his father than take care of him," Meredith said caustically. "That's the best case scenario? It just doesn't seem fair…" she sighed.

"It's not fair," Derek agreed. "But it's better than them having to bury their five year old."

"Yeah, I know," Meredith said.

She was trying her best not to let things get personal. Keeping her emotions in check was important, especially if she wanted to make sure Derek didn't try to talk her out of scrubbing in. He hadn't yet seemed to have figured out that Meredith was thinking of her own childhood, and she was determined to keep it that way for now, for if he knew just how much this case touched her heart, he'd insist that she be assigned to another case—not because he was insensitive, but because he cared.

The images flashed over the monitors and they both leaned in to get a good look at what was going on inside the child's mangled body. Derek pointed to a bleed, which Meredith knew was bad news. "Subdural bleed. Probably caused by the skull fracture. I should be able to fix it as long as it doesn't get much worse," he explained. "Other than that, the brain looks okay."

Meredith clicked on the next set of images, the abdominal and thoracic regions. When everything checked out clean, she looked to Derek confusedly. "No internal bleeding?"

"Doesn't look like it," Derek said, shaking his head. "He got pretty lucky."

"Doctors," an x-ray technician greeted as he opened the sliding door. "I have the kid's x-rays. Broken tibia and fractured fibula," he said.

Derek nodded and took the large envelope from him. "Thank you." He held them up in the light so he and Meredith could get a further look.

Meredith studied them for a moment before she spoke. "Callie should be able to fix his leg pretty easily. He's going to need lots of skin grafts though. Scalp, leg, and shoulder."

"Alright, let's get him out of there," Derek said decisively. "I don't want to wait any longer. OR three is ready for us, so I'll go take him in. I need you to page Callie, Owen, and Mark and have them meet us in there. And call down to the blood bank. Tell them to have lots of Type-O ready for us."

"Okay," Meredith nodded.

She ran to the nurses' station and did what she had to do, and within minutes, the five of them were scrubbing in. The news about the little boy had spread quickly. Everyone was curious to see exactly what a victim of this kind of trauma looked like, so the OR gallery was filled to the hilt with surgeons. But none of the surgeons in the OR seemed to notice their presence.

After giving Aaron another round of medicine through his IV, the anesthesiologist gave the nod for them to begin. Derek took his place at the front of the table, eager to repair the brain bleed. Callie began working on the leg injury, and Meredith assisted Mark and Owen in taking skin from the boy's thighs for the skin grafts. The five year old's heartbeat remained steady, even if it wasn't as strong as they would have liked. He was alive. That was all they could hope for with this level of traumatic injury.

"Kid's a fighter," Owen commented as he checked the heart monitor.

"This leg is a mess, but after a few months of PT, he should have full use of it," Callie said, chipping away the splintered pieces of bone. "I'm gonna need titanium to replace some of this bone," she told one of the nurses so they could page someone to retrieve the pieces from orthopedics.

Mark handed a piece of newly recovered flesh to Meredith. "Kind of ironic. Kid gets struck by lightning and has metal replacing bone. He's going to be afraid of rain for the rest of his life."

"Let's just hope his mother thinks twice before not taking care of her son," Meredith said, the sarcastic undertones dripping from her voice.

"Five year olds rarely listen anyway. Even if she locked him in the house, he still could have found a way outside," Derek pointed out as he operated.

Meredith shrugged. "Point is, you have a five year old, you keep an eye on him. That's what parents are supposed to do."

"She's got a point," Mark said in her defense.

"Where was the mother exactly?" Callie asked curiously.

"Having sex," Meredith informed her. "With her boyfriend."

Callie let out a breath and shook her head. "And now her son could die because of it."

"Social services was talking to her. Apparently, this happened before," Owen told them.

"He was struck by lightning before? This kid should play the lottery with those odds," Mark said.

"Nah, he fell out of his tree house and broke his foot. Mom was AWOL then, too," Owen said, working on Aaron's shoulder.

Meredith frowned beneath her surgical mask. Bad luck seemed to follow the little boy wherever he went. "Poor little kid."

"Asystolic. He's crashing," one of the scrub nurses yelled out.

Owen looked to the rest of the group. "Hands off. Starting manual compressions. Get the crash cart," he said loudly to be heard over the growing chaos of the operating room.

"Damn it," Meredith whispered. Her eyes filled with a thin layer of tears and she looked to Derek. She needed some sort of reassurance that the child would be okay. Derek's eyes met hers instantly. There wasn't much he could do or say to make things better, no matter how much he wanted to.

"His heart can't take the strain. We need to do damage control if he's going to make it. Let his heart regain some strength before we go back in," Owen decided. Mark, Callie, Meredith, and Derek nodded in agreement. Damage control was rare, especially with young children, but it was the safest option.

"Get the plastic," Mark instructed a nurse.

With the help of the scrub nurses, they all managed to cover the boy's body so he could be transported to the ICU. After wrapping a thick layer of protective gauze around Aaron's open brain, they wheeled him to an empty room where he could recuperate enough until they could finish the surgery.

"I'm gonna go talk to his mom with Hunt. I'll meet you in the cafeteria, okay?" Derek said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze as they stood in the hallway.

Meredith nodded and squeezed back. "Yeah, okay."

--

"I got you a turkey sandwich. The salad looked wilted," Meredith said when Derek sat down in the chair across from her in the cafeteria.

"Thank you," Derek smiled. The first smile she'd seen on his face all day. He twisted the cap off of his water bottle and took a sip. "Aaron's mom is pretty upset."

Meredith took a bite of her cheeseburger and the grumbling in her stomach finally dissipated. "Well, maybe this'll teach her a lesson on how to be a responsible parent--I mean, I feel terrible for Aaron, but what did his mother expect?"

"Just because she wasn't watching him doesn't mean she wanted him to get struck by lightning," Derek countered.

Meredith shook her head, running a frustrated hand through her hair. "That's not the point, Derek."

"Mer--"

"You don't get it," Meredith interrupted. "His childhood? That was my childhood. Granted I was never struck by lightning in a thunder storm, but I could have been, and no one would have noticed it. No one deserves that, Derek."

Derek reached for her hand across the table and held it in his own. If he had known how much this case would affect her, he would have made sure she wasn't involved in it. The old wounds from her childhood were healing, and something like this just tore the bandaid right off. "Mer, if this is...I would understand if you didn't want to scrub in again. I know this is tough."

She pulled her hand back from his at his words. "I don't need to be taken off the case. I'm fine."

"Fine-fine or Meredith-fine?" Derek asked. There was a distinct line between the two, and he knew it well.

"Derek, stop," Meredith insisted. "It's always hard, no matter what the situation is. But when you throw a neglected kid into the mix, it's ten times harder. That doesn't mean I can't keep my emotions in check."

Derek backed off, not wanting to anger her. Sometimes his best attempts to help went awry. "Okay, okay. Sorry," he apologized.

"If you want me off the case, just say so," she said resolutely.

"I never said I wanted you off of it. I said that if you wanted off, I would understand," Derek said in his defense. "Look, I'm not trying to start anything. And I know we're at work, but that doesn't change the fact that I care about you."

"I know," Meredith whispered. "But that doesn't mean that cases like this won't get to me."

Derek smiled at her sympathetically. "I know."

"I'm surprised you're not more upset about this," Meredith said before taking a sip of her iced tea.

"Of course I'm upset," Derek argued. "What if he were our son? I can't even imagine what his mother is going through--the guilt she has to live with for the rest of her life, knowing that she could've prevented this from happening. No parent deserves that."

While she agreed with what he was saying, Meredith still found it hard to sympathize with the mother. The guilt was nothing compared to the life threatening injuries that her son had suffered. "And no kid deserves something like this either," she said, standing up from her chair. "Look, I need to pee, then I'm going to head back upstairs to sit with him. I'll see you later, okay?"

Derek nodded slowly and gave her a small smile. "Okay. Love you."

"Love you, too."

Though Meredith was doing her best to keep on her brave face, he could tell that no matter how much she fought against it, this case bothered her in a big way. And Derek found himself caught in the middle of it.